On Saturday, February 25 my mom left the hospital after a four night stay to go home with Hospice Care. I had already planned to go to N.C. the following day to take my dad for cataract surgery the next morning. We thought my mom would live several more weeks, if not a couple of months. We were wrong. After two days at home, my mom was admitted to a wonderful hospice facility, known in Goldsboro simply as “Kitty Askins,” where she would die six days later. By the end of last week I would be back in Powhatan, having had the funeral and my mom being buried just a little over two years since her cancer diagnosis.
There are many ways to describe the past few weeks, but in biblical terminology it could be called darkness. We all know that dark places exist in our world: pain, grief, sorrow, sadness, disorientation, despair, frustration, anger, and many more. But, biblically speaking, we also know that in those dark places there is light. In John 1 we read that “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it.” And as sure as I am of the darkness of the past few weeks for my family, I am equally confident that in the midst of that darkness there has been light.
I am grateful for all of the ways that the May Memorial family has been that light for me. Your many texts, calls, cards, emails, Facebook Messages, and flowers have reminded me that God’s love and promise take on hands and feet within the Church. You all have been God’s love incarnate, and I don’t know what I would have done without you.
You all will never know how much it meant to me for such a large group from May Memorial to come to my mother’s funeral. I have a lot of family in North Carolina who are important to me, but to have my church family there was a comfort that it hard to describe.
One day God’s victory over death will be fully realized; one day the world will be put “to right.” One day “death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” Just as Christ was raised, we will be raised. But until then, while we live and struggle in these dark places, we know that the light still shines and in so doing the darkness is bearable. The darkness will never overcome the light. Amen.